1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to method and apparatus for winding tape and, more particularly to method and apparatus for winding tape, which are optimal for the partial binding of a wiring harness.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A wiring harness is an electric wiring system which is incorporated into an automotive vehicle, a copier, etc. and generally includes a multitude of electric wires, terminals and connectors.
Since the wiring harness may include a multitude of circuits depending upon the kind of product incorporating it, it is not easy to assemble a final harness at one time. Thus, normally, the following production process has been employed to obtain the final harness. Specifically, the wiring harness is divided into a plurality of intermediate wire assemblies. After fabricating the respective intermediate wire assemblies, they are combined and bound.
Each intermediate wire assembly is, preferably, fabricated by way of a peeling step in which the insulation of each end of an electric wire cut into a specified length is peeled, a cramping step in which a terminal is cramped with the core of the electric wire exposed by the peeling step, and a terminal inserting step in which the cramped terminal is inserted into a connector housing (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 1-313872).
There are cases where the partial binding is required: portions of the wires constituting the intermediate wire assembly (generally portions of wires connected with one single terminal) are bound with tape near their ends.
It is preferable to automatically carry out the partial binding in view of automatizing the fabrication of the intermediate wire assembly. There have been proposed methods and apparatuses for automatically binding bundles of wires constituting the intermediate wire assembly with tape (also known as "taping").
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 1-313872 discloses the art of binding bundles of wires constituting the intermediate wire assembly with tape.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 64-63285 discloses the following construction: the ends of cut wires are held by clamps secured on a conveyor extending in a predetermined conveying direction and partial binding is carried out for the wires composing the intermediate wire assembly while conveying the held wires which are laid over their entire lengths on the conveyor in the predetermined conveying direction.
The above publications disclose no specific construction for an automatic partial binding, which is, therefore, at present manually carried out. However, manual binding disadvantageously causes the quality of the products to largely vary and the defect rate to become worse.
The construction disclosed in the latter publication No. 64-63285 may enable the automatization of the partial binding to a certain extent. However, since the wires comprising the intermediate wire assembly are laid over their entire lengths on the conveyor to carry out the partial binding, a long conveying path is required. In the case of a harness of large size, the installation for the production line is required to become larger, accordingly. This is not practical because of its high production cost.
In view of the problems residing in the prior art, it is an object of the present invention to provide method and apparatus for winding tape, which enable the automatization of the partial binding in a process of producing an intermediate wire assembly needed to be partially bound without increasing the size of the production line.